Ask HN: Best technical kindle books | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best technical kindle books

6 pointsemilam6 comments

I am going to be traveling a lot in the next couple of weeks so I am looking for some new technical books for my kindle. I'm wondering what you have been reading on your kindle and what you would recommend. I just finished reading Building Scalable Websites by Cal Henderson, and Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran.

I'm open to any suggestions. I don't want to be stuck on a plane flight with nothing good to read.

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I've got an original Kindle, not the DX. Most of the time when converting a doc, it comes out readable enough. Its not perfect, but, readable.

However, pragprog offers kindle editions of most of their books. These are all perfectly formatted for reading. And usually very useful to read.

How well do tech books hold up on the Kindle? If there is code, does it display OK? I realize there is no syntax coloring, which is a major downside for me, but I guess for small amounts of code it might be OK. How about diagrams?

I imagine anything with large amounts of code won't do well in this format. Higher-level (like the OP mentioned) or software-engineering books might do a bit better (I have Mythical Man-Month in queue).

Yes, they look wonderful:

http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2009/06/12/technical-doc...

Aah, this is on a Kindle Dx - I only have the Kindle 2...

Kindle DX does perfectly well with PDF, although you don't get real zoom (if you turn it horizontal, though, it will fit the PDF to the Kindle DX's width). PDFs also lose the dictionary lookup and markup abilities that you get by using the Kindle's mobipocket formats or plain TXT. I don't know how it works if you convert your PDFs; I believe images can be included for diagrams. Pictures look very good on the Kindle in general.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf titles are available in mobi format. I'm reading Programming Clojure (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure) and overall the experience is good, though the coding snippets don't scale with the rest of the test.

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